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"Outs" Battlefield 4? What, are they going to be in rainbow camouflage or something?

Nah, it's just set in 1000 BC, and you play the Athenians against the Persians.

Like Plato said,

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.

Loved the series before it so I preordered.
I finally get the game and find it has created the most elitist and troll infested cesspool of a game I've ever encountered. Between the stat padders on Operation Metro and the server admins kicking me for outscoring them, I got fed up.
I think the final straw was when forum 'discussions' degenerated into the person with the highest KD ratio automatically being right about everything.
The community killed that game.

Honestly, if you expect any kind of sensible or worthwhile debate on forums for a game like Battlefield or CoD then you need to get a better understanding of the world of gaming. It's best to just keep away, there's nothing of value there.

I'm not sure what platform you're playing on, but there are a number of servers that genuinely do just have no rules, and there are official DICE servers on the XBox 360. Stick to these rather than some child-ru

With significant encouragement from EA by way of uncapped player levels, a million unlocks, and no official servers. A huge number of players seem to be playing (and often cheating or stat padding) for themselves with little regard for their team. Not to mention that every server has different rules. While there are still good rounds of BF3 to be had, it can be hours before you encounter one. I don't see myself buying another BF game unless they cap player lev

I stopped buying EA games when every single one started having a web interfaced that required me to download a browser plug-in to launch a windows EXE on my local hard drive.
I don't want to download your shitty browser plug-in and be forced to use a shitty browser just to launch the game. I want to click one button to launch the executable and be in the game.
I won't spend $70 on any EA game. I won't even play a Free to Play EA game because of this.

What's wrong with Steam? The games are DIRT cheap (I got the Deus Ex series for $15 with all the DLC, Saints 3 for $12.50) and it takes care of the MP, the patches, makes game backups beyond simple, matchmaking and chat for your friends, can't be simpler. And if you don't want to play online? just put it in offline mode, easy as that.

Hell the prices on Steam would be cheap for rentals, much less full games and all the extras make it worth it IMHO. It sure as hell beats having to restore a disc image becau

It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago. Now games have better graphics, better replayability, on-line multiplayer, etc. and they sell new from $40-$60. That's not bad given the progression since then. I'd ask you to get off my lawn now, but it's been paved over with concrete.

Your argument is flawed. Back then, games were a niche market. Less people were buying them, the industry was just getting started, and games came with manuals.
Today, games are prevalent, the market is understood, and the industry has been around a while. They also have no manuals.
However, cost is going up because industries are getting greedy and are creating a false environment of "games are in trouble thus we must raise prices".

Commodities like food and transportation has already reached its base point - they are sold at just barely above material cost - sometimes below when subsidized by outside sources such as the government. The profit margin is miniscule, which is part of why food costs the same and farmers are making such piss-poor money compared to 10 years ago, and why auto makers are constantly getting bailed out.

If the video game industry charged just over cost of programmer time, API licensing, and distribution costs, we

That made game much cheaper to produce than it was a long time ago. In fact, you have to wonder why the price stay fixed at 50$ rather than go lower, seeing the poor quality of certain products and obvious , VE

that was 20 something years ago, and hell if you dont want to pay 70 2012 bucks for a game that has higher production quality than most movies from 20 something years ago and gives you months of entertainment, wait

yea OMFG wait, by Christmas it will be in the sub 30$ bin at walmart and still have thousands of players.

of all the things people can bitch and whine about new games, cost is not really one of them

a 2600 game would cost you 77 bucks todaya SNES game would cost you 79 bucks todayMetal Gear solid would cost you 84 bucks today

(and we haven't even left the 90's yet)so please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!

And the money they put into developing them has gotten ridiculously higher. A typical game takes around 3 years to make with hundreds of people working on it to finish. A typical NES game could be made by a handful of people in less than a month.

Sales of games have gone up as well. More people buy them, and marginal cost has gone way, WAY down. Console cartridges had a fairly high marginal cost. Those chips weren't that cheap. DVDs cost next to nothing, a full boxed game costs $1-2 at most to make. Digital distribution is even cheaper, costing only a few cents for a download at most and the cost is borne entirely by the company running the DD service.

Also DD allows for more profit per title. Steam, Impulse, etc take less of a cut than retail. Standard retail markup is usually 100%. So if you want a retailer to sell your product for $60, you have to charge them $30. Just the kind of margins required to make money with all the costs of retail. DD charges less, Steam doesn't reveal their specifics but it is more around a 30/70 split (70% to you) than the 50/50 of retail.

Of course if the DD happens to be owned by the company then all they pay is the cost to host and transfer it to customers (usually they outsource that to someone like Akamai) which as I said is only a few cents.

So really it seems to make sense that maybe games should be costing less. Yes the product cost is higher, but distribution costs are very low and of course we all know from ECON 200 that lower prices equal more sales.

The question is all one of value for the money. If they want $70 for their game and other companies will sell them on sale on Steam for $20, then maybe they don't get many people paying $70.

so please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!

While I agree, I hate the trend of the games today.

- Most modern games have zero replay value.- Most modern games come with nothing, a DVD in a case and if you're lucky there's a one page card inside with a link to a website which may show you how to play.- Some modern games come feature incomplete. Here's your new game. Oh what you wanted that bit of the story too? Well you can have that as soon as you send us yet MORE money.- A 2600 or SNES had actual cartridges which cost actual money to produce. They were a significant portion of the distribution costs. Todays games come on a flimsy 20c sheet of plastic (if you're lucky) and sometimes you don't even get that instead option for some download effectively cutting distribution costs out completely.

I look at the costs of games today and I don't think much about it, but when I look at what I actually get, what I hold in my hand and the entertainment it (sometimes very briefly) provides I fell ripped off.

untrue. today's games have very rich multiplayer components, and people play it for 6-12 months every night. sounds pretty replayable to me.

Most modern games come with nothing, a DVD in a case and if you're lucky there's a one page card inside with a link to a website which may show you how to play.

that's because they have an inbuilt tutorial. which is miles better than a static list of controls and moves.

Some modern games come feature incomplete. Here's your new game. Oh what you wanted that bit of the story too? Well you can have that as soon as you send us yet MORE money.

i agree, but even without dlc, the game is fairly complete. usually.

A 2600 or SNES had actual cartridges which cost actual money to produce. They were a significant portion of the distribution costs. Todays games come on a flimsy 20c sheet of plastic (if you're lucky) and sometimes you don't even get that instead option for some download effectively cutting distribution costs out completely.

providing gigabytes of download to millions of people also costs something. maybe not as much as a cartridge/dvd, but its not free. and i think all that is offset by the level of sophistication o

Of all the examples you listed, how many of those ~$80 can you still play 20 years later after the studio is gone or no longer supporting the game? The way EA is setting up Origin, you are just renting the games and they only guarantee access for 2years in the Origin TOS. With DLC and in game ads, they are overcharging for the game.

please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!

Wages aren't keeping up with inflation, neither minimum wages nor typical wages. Unemployment is at levels not seen since the great depression. STFU that game prices have gotten cheaper, they are now a larger percentage of the typical disposable income.

Wow... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days:) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?

Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what... they are. God - duke nukem

I paid $90 for Oblivion, $90 for Skyrim, and that's about it for full-priced titles over the past 7-8 years. Over the past three years I've gone Steam and GOG crazy, hoovering up cheap games and spending way more than I used to when it was 'pick one title and make it last'. At my age I reckon I have more games than I can possibly finish in my lifetime, but I still keep buying the suckers.

Have to agree with that. I shunned steam for eons. Downside is have to be on line, it calls home, etc, etc. But then realized that so does google, yahoo, etc. Everybody tracks everything. Welcome to the 21st century.

But on the other hand everything you buy is always there on your machine. No nostalgically remembering that old game and having to dig thru boxes to find it and reinstall it. It's just there.

As far as pricing... last weekend they had a max payne 3 sale. $39. That's a $59 game that's what... a mo

Everything in Australia is more expensive. Even your cheapest supermarkets charge 2-3x the prices of American supermarkets. The only thing you have going for you is a significantly higher minimum wage (for adults, anyway - you tend to screw teenagers).

Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.

It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.

This is the same EA who recently said that they were going to a full-on digital company too, and cutting out the middleman(aka retail boxed stores) eventually. Well, isn't that interesting. You'd think, maybe, just possibly, they'd take the reasonable approach and sell something for less and in turn make more money by selling more copies. Instead of charging more money, and selling one copy.

I bet those crooks will sell or allow the evil aussie ozziesoft or who ever, have country wide exclusive distribution rights, and have their own 40% markup for zero work.

EA, please dump/ignore ALL au middle men, setup your own EAAU HQ, and use it to bring in all games at true true true wholesale prices ($40USD) and sell them to AU shops at 65AU, so they can retail for $70AU in shops, below every single retailer selling competitors products in AU for $110+.

Screw the middle men, the exact work they do is nothing special that EA cannot do themselves in AU.

If they've upgraded the game engine significantly, opened up the world (or at least removed the artillery insta-death wall around all the levels), and made the enemy take wounding damage and react accordingly, then yes, that's a distinct improvement over previous iterations of the franchise. If it's just what amounts to a map pack for the same engine with a short-ass totally linear single-player campaign bolted on, then it's Doom with extra shiniez and they can go phuq themselves.

I'm going to use my awesome psychic powers here to predict that it's a map pack with a 10-hour campaign bolted on, and a handful of obscure weapons added to the multiplayer. Because that's much, much cheaper than actually doing any work.

Most games companies (excluding Valve) are no longer in the business of providing top-quality entertainment. Their job now is to figure out precisely how little they can give you, and how much they can charge you, before you finally vote with your wallet and go somewhere else. You know that if the game makers came up with a 16-hour campaign, the publishers would release an 8-hour campaign, and 2 x 4-hour DLC.

I haven't bought anything in the last 6 months that wasn't on Steam. Still working through Arkham City, Psychonauts, Serious Sam 3, Braid, Rock of Ages, and Assassins Creed. I don't need or want to buy any new games at $70 or UKP equivalent - I'll just wait until they show up on Steam in a year for half that.

first flatscreen TVs were in tens of thousands range. You see what i am getting at?Games used to be a niche, a luxury, now they are a mainstream entertainment for the masses and a mature industry - economies of scale should apply, considering digital distribution, tech advances and what not... not to mention depressed economy.

Or, you could simply stop questioning the skill and expertise of the multimillion dollar marketing department

This guy loves the Koch! He's insatiable!

using good old fashioned supply and demand 101 to determine the price

What on earth are you going on about? Video games are copyrighted and trademarked products, not commodities with multiple suppliers. Ever heard of market collusion? The classic example is an airline that raises prices on a Friday, then checks to see if it's competitors have followed suit

We typically get charged $130-150 for new console games. The PC equivalents are around $100 so a bit cheaper. The NZ$ is currently worth 80 US cents so you do the maths.

The part that really disgusts me is that NZ salaries are significantly lower than the US and yet entertainment costs are way higher. Heck, I can buy Blu ray discs from the UK for half the cost delivered than I can just by going to JB Hifi down the road. Shame that Amazon UK won't sell us games too because the UK prices on those are typic

I bought Mass Effect 3 and you wouldn't believe all the hoops I had to jump through just to play the game. One of them was as silly as downloading the game files from the EA server even if I had them on the DVDs I had bought. The Origin client was a beta version, and when I contacted EA support to ask for a stable, they said they don't have one. I also asked if I could play the game if Origin network is shut down. The answer was that it's a new network and it's constantly expanding, so I shouldn't worry about it shutting down.

I can not even remember the last time I paid $60 for a new game, let alone $70. Thank goodness Walmart exists to keep game companies honest, because gamestop certainly does not put up much of a fight in the price department (new releases routinely are $60 or $70 on Gamestop pre-order, but on actual day of release, Walmart puts em out at $49.99

"Next-gen pricing" is an abomination. Overcharging is not even "next-gen", it's old fashioned "squeeze consumers for every penny", early 20th century greed. The kind that makes your customers lose enough respect that they wait for SKIDROW to come out with the unofficial demo.

Anyway, Battlefield 3 was overpriced by about $20. At $39 I would have felt like it was a worthwhile purchase. At $59 I felt ripped-off. The additional customers EA would have gotten at the lower price point would have more than made up for the lower price-per-unit and maybe your customers wouldn't hate you so much.

Episodic content can be done well if you can push episodes out on a schedule. Game devs should take a page from TV and code ("film") all their episodes in advance then release them every 2 months or something. Basically, buffer the entire "season" and release it incrementally.

It's even worse when they charge those insane prices for downloadable copies. With online downloads they no longer have the bullshit excuse of more expensive distribution in Australia yet still geo-discriminate (it's totally a word) to not undercut the physical copies. Skyrim was $89 on Steam at launch.

Yeah nah. EA are scum, always have been. Activision just rehash their crap and charge $15 for map packs without shame but they know that they provide a service and at least respect their paying customers. EA are the worst kind of hypocrites, flooding the market with crappy sports titles and generic cod-clones and then claim to be "a driving force of innovation". They say they will never do sales like steam sales, because it devalues games. Have you seen Origin lately? Sale Sale Sale Sale. Not only that, you try getting support on your title. I'm sure if you've kept up with gaming news you know all about EA's retarded banning policy, and how they handled people criticising Bioware. EA spit in the face of their customers.

Ubi just have crappy drm and price gouging. They aren't actively malicious like EA.

I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?

Because I've had more hours out of it than just about any game I paid $60 for by quite a margin. The cost relative to the amount of entertainment I'd get out of it would still be better than most $60 titles - to me, $70 for 120hrs of entertainment is still far better than than the average $60 for maybe 10 - 20hrs of entertainment I get out of most games.

In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore, because it just got ever shitter since World at War culminating in the abysmal fuckup of a game that was Black Ops. If it started to get better again I might, but the franchise has just dropped to the level of a A shooter rather than an AAA shooter, and I can pick up any number of A rated shooters released over the years for fuck all - they're 10 a penny.

I don't have a problem paying a bit more for something that's actually worth it, what I wont pay more for is shit.

I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?

I wont be. Why?

Because Battlefield 3 was shit. Because they made the unlocables too lopsided, because after they charge you the US$70 which translates into no less then A$150 they still want $20 odd a month for premium which like unlockables, will be so lopsided as to make the game unplayable if you don't pony up the monthly danegeld, sorry, subscription fee.

BF 1942 and BF2 were works of art, BF Bad Company 2 was good, BF3 was just a huge steaming pile of unbalanced crap that I stopped playing after 3 days.

In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore

I haven't paid for COD since COD United Offensive back when CoD was a decent game.

I don't have a problem paying a bit more for something that's actually worth it, what I wont pay more for is shit.

I do have a problem with paying more, games are overpriced as they are but there's always some numpty that doesn't think when handing over money for the latest call of halo or whatever. To be frank, it's what is killing the games industry by rewarding publishers who release mediocre sequels with a large percentage of the budget dedicated to marketing.

As a professional video game developer on the same platforms, I have to ask: why are you charging more? The cost of bringing games like this to the market has plummeted for large dev houses compared to their retail cost. Their labor is at a fixed rate and has an easy transition to existing properties like this, leaving just content development and level planning for a "new" rehashed game from one of their franchises.

If they were rewriting the graphics and physics engine each time, I would believe it and say it's a fair price - those parts of a game are a lot of work when done from scratch. However, I would guess they're just using Havok or Unreal or something of that nature instead, which just costs them a small licensing fee and not a shit-ton of programmer time. That alone should knock some of the game price off.

They have a subsidized online subscription service. On top of the already-too-expensive game purchase, they want you to pay a 'premium fee' to play online? Hell no. You get one or the other, trying to collect on both is far too greedy and people just aren't going to buy your steaming pile of rehashed done-and-done-again shit.

I still play Counterstrike / Condition Zero / Day of Defeat / HL2 Deathmatch which ran me about $10 years and years ago. Those are some rock-solid classic shooters, and I find the community supports them even more now that the gawkers and "ooh, new shiny" players have moved on to other games.

EA is just in this for money - don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They don't have their staff or customers' best interests in mind, and they never will. Don't believe the hype, and don't feed the trolls.

Infantry only Karkand in BF2 is the best PvP shooter ever. I'd still be playing it if all the servers hadn't cratered or started sucking, were overrun by hacks and shitty admins, all the good players hadn't been herded in to the stupidity of BF3, etc.

The ridiculously overdone gimmicks and graphics in COD and BF3 add absolutely nothing to the game, they just make them expensive to produce and expensive to buy and cluttered to look at. Unlocks are also a non starter for me, everyone should have t

I think you are full of bullshit, how can you judge an online game if you played it for only 3 days

The same way you and I judge a movie after watching it once for the 90 to 120 minutes it takes to watch it. The insinuation that you have to invest literally days into something before you know if you like it is absurd. If we were to do that for everything, none of us would have time to find anything we like. For those of us with jobs and families and might only have an hour or two a day (if we're lucky) to play, we need to know quickly whether or not this is something we want to invest our precious time

What makes you think it is overpriced? Compared to many other forms of entertainment,

But we aren't comparing it to other forms of entertainment, we are comparing it to it's contemporaries. When Entertainment widgets A and C cost $2 each and Entertainment widget B costs $4 plus $2 each for the seventeen downloadable content widgets we know that the piss is being taken.

But as I eluded to, there is always some dingbat who tries to justify greedy price rises with semi-retarded comparisons. I'll hit you wit

-BF3 has, in general, meh maps. Flags are clustered in the center rather than spread out. Map design compromises for multiple game types make them mediocre for Conquest AND Rush. So, there might be lots of space, but no reason to be there.

-Login/usage issues with Origin and Battlelog.

-Taclights I could light my whole house with.The blinding factor would be tolerable, if it only did that in dark environments. But even in bright daylight, its just a

I don't want it and won't buy it. After the farce of 6Gb+ of "updates" being required for B3 I'm completely off buying anything from EA again. Why should you have to download the DLC you have no intention of paying for just to continue playing the game? No thanks, I'll stick with 1943 and BBC2 (both brilliant games), and switch to MW or whatever when the servers are finally turned off, EA have lost my custom for good. I did try to get in touch with them regarding the "updates" but they wouldn't talk to

I don't know about that, I used to buy a ton of EA games, especially the MoH series and after they moved to Origin and cranked up the douchebaggery to 11 i haven't bought a single thing from them, and I know several people who have done the same.

Sure like Madden you'll always have the hardcores, like my friend Dale who actually has a deal set up with the local gamestop so every Madden and NASCAR game is dropped off at his house on release day so its waiting when he gets off work, but you're certainly not g

You do realize that the price over there is going to increase proportionately, right? So you can expect another $10-15 added to your cost as well. Sure, it was kinda funny the first couple times a poster pointed out this has been "normal" in other areas of the world for a while now, but it's only going to get even worse for you if it gets worse for us.

I imagine that they're hoping to take a total of $100 total revenue per person from the game. That's a rough average of the people who pay $70 vs the people who pay $70 + the cost of all the DLC (another $50) over the course of the year.

They should price the games according to the country being sold, like it's happening for years now with drugs. The can't complain for piracy when they sell a 70$ game to someone gaining 7$ a day. All these lost profits have the potential to lower the price for everyone.